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mackerelphones · 1 year

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YU-NO, the Classic PC-98 Incest Porn That Defined a Generation, Is Worse Than You Think

Some months ago, over on my website, I wrote a review of the hilariously acclaimed time travel-ish PC-98 porn game YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of This World. People trip over themselves to worship this thing. Hey, I have room on this Tumblr blog and should not stop promoting writing just 'cause it's not brand new, so here is the opening of my YU-NO review. If you want even more dirty details, please just click the link down near the bottom of the post and read the whole thing (or click here). It is practically a short book.

In 1996, Elf published the original PC-98 release of YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of This World, written by Kanno Hiroyuki, revolutionizing “visual novels.” Through its impressive scale and long playtime, YU-NO set expectations of scope and narrative complexity later titles would emulate, or so many sources allege. Mages published an HD remake of YU-NO in 2017, releasing it in English in 2019. This review, however, regards the extraordinary 2011 fan translation by TLWiki, though it is not a review of the translation itself (aside from one decision regarding the graphics). Not “merely” a translation of a lengthy script, the patch transforms the lackluster 2000 Windows port into a version of YU-NO perhaps more definitive than any other, including the full voice acting from and scenes then exclusive to the Sega Saturn release, the uncensored graphics and script of the PC-98 original, and high-quality versions of Umemoto Ryu’s enchanting FM soundtrack. Please take nothing I say to belittle TLWiki’s outstanding effort, one which seems to have vanished from the internet with the emergence of the Mages remake and its graphics bland as stock photography.

Some writeups of YU-NO shower the multiple-award-winning title with cringing adoration as a moving masterpiece and one of the finest video games ever created. I sometimes wonder if I came from an alternate universe, much like happens in YU-NO, where the version of YU-NO I played is a different beast than the one, in an embarrassing Hardcore Gaming 101 article, Audun Sorlie touts as “a true masterpiece” that “remains just as revolutionary as it did in 1996” “not soon to be forgotten or surpassed.” However, the evidence of other people’s gameplay footage, as well as the principle of uniformitarianism, assure me I played the same video game.

I prefer to avoid writing material as negative as what follows. However, on my Mackerel Phones YouTube channel, I have often referenced YU-NO, as in the Time Zone video whose ideas appeared in my head while recovering from YU-NO. So it would be valuable to explain these references. My let’s play of YU-NO and my largely comedic 2020 video “Who’s Afraid of Yu-no?” are no longer online. Their legacy is a community guidelines strike on my channel and me opting to delete several unrelated quality videos for fear of them possibly violating YouTube’s capricious content policies. The loss of this material has spurred me to return to YU-NO for this third and, I pray, final time in this review and the analytical essay I have also posted to mackerelphones.com. So, on my own website where only I can decide how much nudity is acceptable, I decided to speak my piece on YU-NO more at length than in “Who’s Afraid of Yu-no?” I have expended considerable time on this review and with the essay, so please share it with anyone you think may find it interesting.

To begin, I will address what almost no other YU-NO writeup or review (!) mentions. Here is some ad copy used for the 2017 remake from a post on noisypixel.net: “YU-NO tells the story of a love that awaits from beyond this world.” That love is a mysterious naked woman who appears in the Prologue, and Takuya’s true love and true, final sexual partner in the true ending. And she is his biological daughter.

Most of YU-NO serves as a setup for the final section, what I will call the Epilogue, a half-pedophiliac parent–child incest romance story. “A love that awaits you from beyond this world”—is whoever wrote that trolling? Prior to that point, YU-NO was sometimes pretty and, despite gratuitous rape, casual sexism, poor game design, and other problems hardly shocking for some porn adventure game from the ’90s, largely engaging. But the incestuous finale transforms YU-NO from an unfortunate product of its time into the worst trash I ever made the mistake of playing. When I seem to say anything positive about YU-NO later on, please keep in mind this caveat.

The above screenshot is our hero Takuya making out with his daughter in the Prologue.

“Papa… You’re getting stiff…” Our hero, everybody! (Granted, in this particular scene, he is apparently not actually getting stiff. It is only in the next scene his daughter is trying to get into his pants.)

As the credits rolled and I processed these tens of hours of my life, I felt the unhinged Epilogue had come out of nowhere. Sometimes people describe a story as “firing on all cylinders.” YU-NO’s ending fizzles out and dies on all cylinders, casting a pall over what came before. For endings never emerge from nothing. The Prologue opens with player character Arima Takuya remembering his own father considering him a sexual rival for his mother in his infancy (!) and concludes with Takuya making out with his daughter from the future (!). The player then embarks on a quest whose goal turns out to be having sex with their daughter whom the player raises from infancy in-game to really hammer home that, yes, this is your kid and you should really want to bone your kid. See this actual baby, your actual baby? the script seems to say—you better dream of pounding her pussy.

“Just look at these puffy cheeks. There just has to be something stuffed inside of there.” Her cheeks are quite clearly not puffy.

This epic-scale tale hailed as enthralling and beautiful ends with Takuya choosing to abandon the community, friends, and family the player has spent tens of hours getting invested in to instead spend the rest of his life alone at the beginning of time having sex with his vapid shrill-voiced mommy-child-wife with a child’s brain in an adult’s body who just so, so wants to sniff and fuck her dad. Her name? Yu-no.

YU-NO, then, may as well be entitled Fuck Your Daughter Quest. This is the ending, the point of YU-NO set out in the very title. That elf child on the cover is supposed to turn you on. Player self-insert Takuya says over an image of full-frontal child nudity, “she started becoming well-fleshed in all the pivotal positions, making me unsure of where to rest my eyes. Even if it’s your own daughter, it’s still a naked girl running around in front of you. It’s hard to just shut down your instincts.”

The above is the one screenshot I censor in the post on my website. Every person who preaches about how great YU-NO is or dares defend Takuya has to answer for this shit.

I hope this isn’t what the reviewer on noisypixel.com meant when the praising the sugary-sweet raise-and-fuck-your-daughter ending route for “having a reasonably shocking twist” (I can think of only one other twist, the Ayumi spit-take I describe in the section of my review titled “The Worst Ending of All Time”). Retroactively, characters asking Takuya what his plans for the future might be or even showing him trust send a chill down one’s spine. When, in the Prologue, his stepmother Ayumi tells Takuya that her wish is “for [him] to walk wholeheartedly on the path [he chooses,]” this path is abandoning the rest of humanity to become his own daughter’s sexual partner. I am tempted to say a human writer, but out of respect for Kanno, I will say a good writer would craft this scenario as a visceral condemnation of Takuya. But, with sappy romantic music and sappier writing, YU-NO depicts this relationship as aspirational. This must be that “revolutionary” quality Sorlie refers to. I can’t think of anything else quite like it!

That Sorlie glosses over the story being about how incestuous love saves the universe as YU-NO being “cerebral in the ways it challenges morals and logic” is laughable. Let us read some of that “cerebral” dialogue challenging conventional morality:

YU-NO: “Why can’t parent and child make love to each other?”

TAKUYA: “T-that’s, well… hmm, I wonder why.”

Takuya concludes that because there are no laws against it in the parallel world he is in, parent–child incest is acceptable. Really makes you think. Dostoevsky got nothing on this ponderous philosophizing. Move over, Bataille—my notions of morality can never recover from such a thoroughgoing attack. /s

***

Here ends this preview of the full post. A sample of some of the sweet, sweet sentences further in my review:

The Epilogue of YU-NO warrants special treatment. Sorlie calls it “one of the most exhilarating and incredible experiences you will ever have while playing a video game”—a scathing indictment of video games. I admit I was not so exhilarated with Takuya’s pet-like wife Sayless who looks identical to his mom or Takuya perving over his kid when she is twelve (!) or Takuya taking the side of the theocratic dictatorship that enslaves him and kills his wife or Takuya failing to save the day while other actually interesting characters (plus Yu-no) suffer and die to stop Ryuuzouji’s evil plot to destroy the universe. I guess that shows I am one of those “sensitive gamers” whom Sorlie cautions might be weirded out by the cerebral power of the badly plotted incest porn isekai. (To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand YU-NO…)

This is just the beginning of my long and girthy YU-NO review in which I break down my all-time least favorite video game like I am piranha solution. There is MUCH more to it, and it is really funny imo, so please check it out over on my website (though maybe not if you’re in a place where seeing some nudity would be inappropriate). And please reblog this if you think your followers could use a good splash of water to the face. Or might find it interesting, whichever.

#yu-no #yu-no: kono yo no hate de koi o utau shoujo #pc-98 #visual novel #video game #yu-no is bad #anime bullshit

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